DOROTHEA BRANDE’S TIMELESS FORMULA FOR SUCCESS

Following on from yesterday’s post on searching for a lost voice, and still feeling a need for greater clarity in my thinking,  I reached for a book from my bookshelf  that always gives me sustenance and hope.

Wake Up And Live! by Dorothea Brande is a book first published in 1936 which I bought 35 years ago for 70p from the Staffs Book Shop in Lichfield (which is sadly no more).

It  now seems to be out of print so ,while copies can still be found on the net, a new paperback edition can set you back $375.48 at Amazon.Com.

Thankfully, this being the sharing caring digital age, I’m not about to make a fortune selling my tatty volume on e-bay as anyone interested in reading it can do so for free by downloading a PDF copy that some kind soul has uploaded for mass consumption.

This individual has done a noble public service as this is a book that ,while  a little dated , will probably never reach a sell by date since the sound advice contained in the pages is so down to earth and practical.

Unlike so many books in the field of self-help, it does not carry any hidden religious agenda – it doesn’t require the reader to have faith in a higher being; the only faith you need is a belief in yourself.

SPEAKING OUT – HEALING MY LIFE

The disembodied mouth in Samuel Beckett's 'Not I' is a poignant image of isolation.

I am often sceptical of holistic remedies and new age thinking but Louise Hay’s ‘You Can Heal Your Life’ contains a lot of explanations and advice about feelings of dis-ease that more often than not accurate.

She identifies just two mental patterns that poison the body and lead to illness : fear and anger.

I currently have a sore throat and feel that I am on the point of losing my voice.

Louse Hay describes the throat as an “avenue of expression” and a “channel of creativity”.

As a consequence, she states that problems with this part of my body are due to: “the inability to speak up for one’s self. Swallowed anger. Stifled creativity. Refusal to change”.

This diagnosis strikes a chord with me and rings true.

In my family, I am currently feeling that my voice isn’t being heard and am finding it harder to communicate with my 16-year-old daughter who is experiencing a lot of growing pains and psychological challenges resulting from school, boyfriends and other peer pressure.

At work, I am in a situation where I am no longer sure of my role. I am finding it harder to motivate myself and to feel that my work is worthwhile.

In other general situations, when I am with Italians and try to express my opinions; I feel the burden of having to articulate complex ideas or emotions in my second language.

Many of these would be hard enough to say in my mother tongue and the linguistic filter leaves me feeling that I have barely scratched the surface about what it is I really want to say.

Louise L. Hay’s cure is to change my thought pattern and feel that it’s okay to make noise. She advises the following affirmations:

• I express myself freely and joyously.
• I speak up for myself with ease.
• I express my creativity.
• I am willing to change.

The voice of Henry Miller in the opening lines of his novel The Tropic of Cancer also come to mind as I contemplate these thoughts:
“To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing”.

If this post makes you think you should be singing more too – click on ‘like’ button. It would help me feel less alone.

A TIME OF GIFTS

A Time Of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor (1977)

Fermor abandoned formal education at 17 after being expelled following an, by modern standards, innocent flirtation with a girl (it never got beyond the hand holding stage).

The school was probably relieved to find an excuse to get shot of him . One housemaster judged him to be “a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness which makes me anxious about his influence of other boys”. He obviously wasn’t a young man about to be tamed for educational purposes.

Bored by routine and fearful of getting stuck in a rut he resolved “to change scenery; abandon London and England and set out across Europe like a tramp…..travel on foot, sleep in hayricks in summer, shelter in barns when it was raining or snowing and only consort with peasants and tramps”.  This book is the first of two volumes of his memories and adventures, the second volume- Between The Woods And The Water – was published in 1986.

He set off in 1933, and though he wasn’t to know it at the time, Europe was on the brink of war and his journey would take him to countries destined to undergo dramatic and traumatic change.

The route he took mostly on foot, espousing for the most part the soft option of accepting rides, can be gleaned from the chapter titles: The Low Countries – Up The Rhine – Into High Germany – Winterreise – The Danube – Approach To Kaiserstadt – Vienna – The Edge Of The Slav World – Prague Under Snow – Slovakia – The Marches Of Hungary.

Fermor died in 2011, aged 96 and this book was written when he was in his sixties. It is based on notebooks of his “doings” and occasionally vivid, sometimes hazy memories.

A SEPARATION : TRUTH WILL TEAR US APART

A SEPARATION written and directed by Asghar Farhadi (Iran, 2011)

It may be politically sensitive at the moment for the U.S. to acknowledge anything good coming out of Iran, but if there is better foreign language movie to deny A Separation an Oscar then I really would like to see it.

It is common for successful ‘foreign’ movies to be remade in the cinematic lingua franca of English but one of the strengths of Asghar Farhadi’s film is that, while its themes are universal, it is nevertheless imbedded in Iranian culture.

Can you imagine an American actress phoning a religious help line to find out if it is sin to change the soiled clothes of an old man suffering from Alzheimer’s?  Would a Western audience be convinced that swearing upon the holy book would cause such trauma?

Equally, there are not many movies anywhere in the world that would so powerfully raise issues surrounding truth, justice, honour, sin, mercy and guilt.

Nothing in the movie suggests that the Iranian regime is any more repressive than other countries although you can fully understand why an intelligent young woman like Simin would find the theocratic system intolerable.

LEARNING FROM WILE E.COYOTE’S MISTAKES

With the elected philistines (Labour and Conservative) planning to close down at least 10% of  libraries in Britain as part of spending cuts, the book/manifesto ‘Stop What You’re Doing And Read This’  published by Vintage Books can be regarded either as timely or too late.

It is not directly linked to the proposed closures but it is implicitly linked to the issue.

The book serves as an antidote to the general apathy towards books and reading as studies suggest the levels of literacy are falling at an alarming rate.

While I’m sure the texting skills of teenagers are far superior to mine, the ability to write coherent sentences in plain English is plunging.